My mother took me aside and said viciously, regarding Tom’s visit with his girlfriend in October, “They deceived me.”
She looked up from a note she was writing at the dining-room table and asked me, “How do you spell ‘emptiness’? Like, ‘a feeling of emptiness’?”
All through Christmas dinner, she apologized for the absence of the traditional cranberry sorbet, which she’d been too tired to make this year. Each time she apologized, we assured her that we didn’t miss the sorbet at all, the regular homemade cranberry sauce was all the cranberries any of us needed. A few minutes later, like a mechanical toy, she said she was sorry she hadn’t made the traditional cranberry sorbet this year, but she was just too tired. After dinner, I went upstairs and took out my notebook, as I had many times before; but this time I was written.
FROM A POST-HOLIDAY letter of my mother’s:
Dad feels your schedule is so light he’s fearing he isn’t getting his “money’s worth” or something. Actually, sweetie, he is disappointed (perhaps I shouldn’t tell you though I suspect you sense it) that you aren’t graduating with a “saleable skill” as you promised — you’ve done what you loved, granted, but the real world is something else—& it has been extremely costly. I know, of course, you want to “write” but so do tens of thousands of other also talented young people & even I wonder how realistic you are at times. Well, keep us informed as to any encouraging or interesting developments — even a degree from Swarthmore is no guarantee of success, automatically. I hate being pessimistic (I’ve usually been a positive person) but I’ve seen how Tom has wasted his talents & I hope there won’t be repetition.
From my letter in reply:
Perhaps I should make clear a few things that I had considered knowledge common to the three of us.
1. I am in the HONORS PROGRAM. In the honors program we take seminars that require large amounts of independent reading; each one is therefore considered the equivalent of two 4 or 5-hour courses…
2. Just when did I promise to graduate with what you continue to call a “saleable” major? What was this promise tied to? Your continued support of my education? All of this seems to have slipped my memory, you’re right.
3. I know that by now you are reminding me weekly of how “extremely costly” Swarthmore is less for information’s sake than for rhetoric’s. Yet I think you should know that there is a point where such repetition begins to have an effect directly opposite to the one you seek.
From my father’s reply to my reply:
I feel that your letter needs a rebuttal as it contains so many critical — and some bitter — comments. It is a little difficult to reply without the letter from your mother but as background you should recognize by now that she is not always rational or tactful — and also consider that she has not felt well since last September…Even her knee is bothering again. She takes four different pills several times a day which I don’t think is good for her. My analysis is that she has mental concerns that throw her out of balance physically. But I can’t figure out what worries her. Her health is our only concern and that becomes a catch-22 situation.
And from my mother’s reply to my reply:
How can I undo the damage I’ve done, hurting you as I did and feeling so down & so guilty ever since when, because of my love and respect for you (not only as my son but as one of the most special of all people in my life), I am depressed over the poor judgment & unreasonableness of the letter I wrote you when I was in an unfortunate mood. All I can say is, I’m sorry, I’m miserable over it, I trust you completely and I love you dearly——I beg your forgiveness and speak from my heart.
THE LAST OF the novels I’d read in German in the fall, and the one I’d resisted most staunchly, was The Magic Mountain. I’d resisted it because I understood it so much better than the other novels. Its young hero, Hans Castorp, is a bourgeois from the flatlands who goes for a three-week visit to a mountain sanatorium, gets sucked into the hermetic strangeness of the place, and ends up staying for seven years. Castorp is an innocent of the sort who might position himself at the Brain end of a Heart/Brain continuum, and Thomas Mann treats him with a loving irony and monstrous omniscience that together drove me crazy. Mann, as Avery helped us to see, has every symbol worked out perfectly: the bourgeois lowlands are the place of physical and moral health, the bohemian heights are the site of genius and disease, and what draws Castorp from the former up into the latter is the power of love — specifically, his attraction to his fellow patient Clawdia Chauchat. Clawdia really is the “hot cat” that her name in French denotes. She and Castorp exchange glances seven times in the sanatorium dining room, and he’s staying in room 34 (3 + 4 = 7!) and she’s in room 7, and their flirtation finally comes to a head on Walpurgis Night, exactly seven months after his arrival, when he approaches her on the pretext of borrowing a pencil, thereby repeating and fulfilling his bold borrowing of a pencil from a Clawdia-like boy he had a crush on long ago, a boy who warned him not to “break” the pencil, and he has sex with Clawdia once and only once, and never with anyone else, etc. etc. etc. And then, because so much formal perfection can be chilling, Mann throws in a tour de force chapter, “Snow,” about the lethal chilliness of formal perfection, and proceeds to take the novel in a less hermetic direction, which is itself the formally perfect move to make.
The so-German organizational consciousness at work here made me groan the way an elaborate and successful pun does. And yet at the heart of the book there was a question of genuine personal interest both to Mann and to me: How does it happen that a young person so quickly strays so far from the values and expectations of his middle-class up-bringing? Superficially, in Castorp’s case, you might think the fault lies with the little tubercular spot that shows up in his chest x-ray. But Castorp embraces his diagnosis so eagerly that you can see that it’s more like a pretext—“ein abgekartetes Spiel.”[20] The real reason he stays on at the sanatorium and watches his life become unrecognizable to him is that he’s drawn to Clawdia’s mons veneris, her so-called magic mountain. As Goethe put it, in his gendered language, “Das Ewig-Weibliche / Zieht uns hinan.”[21] And part of what so annoyed me about Mann’s ironic condescension to Castorp is its complicity in what seemed to me Castorp’s passivity. He doesn’t actively, restlessly abandon the bourgeois flatlands for an alpine bohemia; it’s something that happens to him.
And happened to me, too. After the holidays, I went to Chicago and saw Tom, who was on his way to being a contractor and designer not unlike the one my father had imagined he should be, and I met his new girlfriend, Marta Smith, who was every bit as excellent as promised (and, indeed, less than a year later, became my mother’s most trusted daughter-in-law). From Chicago, I returned to school a week early and stayed in the apartment above the meat market where the French major lived. Here it immediately became clear that the French major and I were sick of each other, sick of nothing happening. Her housemate, however, the red-haired New Yorker, my competition, had broken up with her Cuban boyfriend, and I sat and watched old movies with her after the rest of the house had gone to bed. She was the smartest person I’d ever met. She could glance at a page of Wordsworth and tell you what Wordsworth was up to in every line. It turned out that she and I shared identical ambitions of putting childish things behind us, and that she, too, in her own way, was in flight from the flatlands. Before long, her voice was playing in my head around the clock. It occurred to me that my interest in her best friend, the French major, might never have been much more than an “abgekartetes Spiel.” The competition and I went to dinner at the house of an off-campus student couple, mutual friends of ours, whose taste in food and clothes we afterward deplored in an orgy of like-mindedness. The following day, after the mail came, she asked me if I knew a person in Chicago named Marta Smith. This stranger Smith had somehow got her hands on a copy of Small Craft Warnings, read a long short story called “Dismembering You on Your Birthday,” and spontaneously written to say she loved it. Marta knew nothing of my interest in the story’s author, and the timing of her letter’s arrival was like a mystical sign from a German novel of the sort I’d momentarily forgotten I didn’t care for.